The Syndicate's CEO discusses the secrets of
maintaining a good guild and why games like Guild
Wars 2 isn't for them
It’s been roughly a year and a half since we talked to
Sean
“Dragons” Stalzer, CEO and Guildmaster of the
longest continuously operating guild in existence
(according to
Guinness),
on
the
eve
of his first book’s release. While Sean’s first
book,
Legend
of
the Syndicate, traced the
history of the now-14 year old guild into the
WoW
era, The Syndicate: Beyond the Legend is equal parts
documentary and
field manual for the creation of stable, durable
guilds.
We spoke with Sean about the more controversial
aspects of his book,
including what the premier online gaming guilds next
game might be and
The Syndicate’s seeming aversion to free-to-play MMOGs
and
box-to-play titles (like
Guild Wars 2),
in our latest The Syndicate interview:
Ten
Ton Hammer: First off,
writing a several hundred page book while running a
1500+ member guild
is no small feat, but you’ve done it twice. Was it
easier or
harder to write second book?
Sean
Stalzer: I think the ideas
came more easily, but the process was more difficult.
I learned a lot
of lessons from the first book. Our first book was
more of a
documentary – this is where we’ve been, this is why
we think we’re great. This one has the historical
documenting
side, but I look at where massively multiplayer online
gaming has been
from 2006 to 2011, this is where we’ve been.
But I was definitely more deliberate in the second
book, in trying to
ensure that the people who buy it and read it get
value from it. Half
the book is all about the feedback we got from our
first book, which
was, ‘If you guys are so great, why aren’t you
telling anyone how you got to be so great.’ So it’s
all about giving people the tools to build a
successful online
community.
Ten
Ton Hammer: It’s
interesting that you got that kind of feedback,
because from previous
conversations you’ve noted that the success of The
Syndicate
is, to a large extent, not repeatable, especially in
this gaming
climate. And in the book, based on the number of
failed guilds in the fifteen years of The Syndicate’s
existence, you peg the odds
at 1 in 55 million.
Sean
Stalzer: To achieve the same
level of success, yea, it’s probably not likely. But
my basic
premise is that if developers can do things to extend
the life of
guilds even by a month or two, there’s a lot less
drama for
the players and a lot more revenue for the developers.
Our hope
isn’t to create other 15 year guilds competing with us
for
the opportunities that go along with that; our hope is
to achieve
greater levels of guild success so that players, in
general, have more
fun.
Ten
Ton Hammer: From the book, it
seems like
Star
Wars: The Old Republic is a
leading candidate as the next game for The Syndicate.
Being an entity
that exists for the guild, not the individual player,
are you concerned
that the game seems the game is too solo-centric?
Sean
Stalzer: I think what
Star Wars
does to buy itself time is that, because it’s a
story-based
game, and each of the classes has its own story. With
subclasses,
that’s 16 movies you can participate in. Even for
people that
don’t like to play alts, they may spend some time
watching
and participating in 16 movies, which gives BioWare
plenty of time to
crank out endgame content.
From a player perspective, at worst, you have a year
of awesome
storytelling, and then at the end of that year, you’ve
got
two more triple-A MMOs coming out that you can jump
into. What the
community needs now is a bridge from
WoW
to the next big thing, or maybe the next big thing.
Ten
Ton Hammer: You offered some
creepily prescient words in the book on account
security. Since the
writing of the book, we’ve seen a pretty massive
breach of
trust between SOE and its stakeholders. Has this
affected your by all
accounts strong relations with SOE?
Sean
Stalzer: We don’t
blame SOE for the security breach any more than any
other company. What
I mean by that is that SOE is probably just as
vulnerable as any other
company, but for whatever reason, the hackers decided
to pick on SOE.
Unfortunately, the security posture isn’t where it
needs to
be, across the board.
The silver lining is that hopefully this becomes the
wakeup call that
corporate-level security needs to be beefed up, but so
does
player-level security. Everyone’s got a role in that.
Players
shouldn’t be sharing passwords, and I think devs have
a
responsibility to protect players from themselves. I’d
liked
to see more baked-in security when you buy the game.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Another
difference I noticed between your first book and this
one is the number
of cool stories rooted in your
Ultima Online
days in the first book. In The Syndicate’s “WoW
Period”, were those stories harder to come by?
Sean
Stalzer: In
WoW
today, you don’t see those same type stories emerge
because
when you go into a battleground, for instance, you get
paired with
people from different servers and you might never see
them again. You
don’t build rivalries, and you don’t have this
ability to directly influence others. So you don’t see
a lot
of stories emerging. You do in
EVE,
but that’s another sandbox game where you can directly
impact
other corporations. But if EA were to create a
UO2
with a similar model to
UO,
I think there would be quite a few players that would
be interested in
it, though it wouldn’t be a
WoW
killer by any means.
Ten
Ton Hammer: The S.U.C.C.E.S.S
anagram , defined during the last part of the book,
summarizes your
keys to creating a long-lasting, stable, fun guild. I
won’t
tell folks the keys – our readers will have to buy the
book
for that – but is it something you devised or
something you
adapted?
Sean
Stalzer: As I was working
through the outline of the book, I wanted to devote a
number of
chapters to developing a successful community. It was
the result of a
brainstorming session to make a bunch of seemingly
disparate ideas fit
together in a cohesive manner. The word “success”
kept coming up, and the word fit the model I was
trying to represent.
So it was more the result of brainstorming; it wasn’t
that
I’d read it somewhere else.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Apart from
creating a 14-year guild with incredible stability, is
there any one
thing that you can point to as your proudest
accomplishment?
Sean
Stalzer: There’s a
lot of examples I can give you. The most recent one
that reinforced our
values was becoming the world first guild to
reach guild
level 25 in
WoW.
There were six other guilds that did it sooner than
us, but they were
victims of a bug that escalated their levels faster
than everyone
else. But of the guilds who legitimately pushed
to 25, we
were the first to reach that milestone on April 11th.
For me, that was
a big achievement; we literally had 400+ people
preparing for a week
beforehand, then all logging in at 3am in the morning
when they should
have been asleep for work the next day. It was a great
gut-check to see
if our core values were in place, and they were.
Ten
Ton Hammer: That’s
interesting to me, because it’s clear throughout the
book
that you’re not a guild about loot or achievements for
the
sake of achievements. But this one was particularly
worthwhile?
Sean
Stalzer: We don’t
put a lot of stock in ‘a new boss came out and we
rushed to
kill it.’ That’s a great achievement for 25 people,
but this one was one that could not be achieved unless
massive numbers
of people pitched in together and did so in an
unselfish manner, with a
lot of pre-planning and thought.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Is it
disappointing to you that aren’t more guild-based
achievements? I know you’re a leading proponent of
adding
more guild-centric hooks to online games. Why does
this seemingly
obvious thing continue to fall on deaf ears?
Sean
Stalzer: I think it falls on
deaf ears even with
WoW;
many of the so-called guild achievements are just
personal achievements
with the guild moniker slapped on. There’s just not a
lot of
creativity or effort put into giving players something
worth achieving
that they couldn’t do individually or in small groups.
The
industry just hasn’t embraced the idea that the more
tools
you give guilds to stay stable, the more revenue you
make, and the
happier the players are.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Fifteen years into this, it
continues to amaze me that we
haven’t figured out good ways of funneling players
into
larger social groups and guilds, especially when
that’s the
only clear advantage MMOGs have over other types of
games.
Sean
Stalzer: Absolutely. These
games exist for social groups. The term “massively”
doesn’t mean a bunch of people standing around, it
means a
bunch of people working towards goals in a cohesive or
(even) combative
manner. If you look at a lot of development companies,
they
don’t put the focus on their community, or community
tools,
or community achievements – it’s almost an
afterthought.
But, in the future, I think the companies that focus
on the community
will be the differentiators. There’s a limit to how
much
money corporations and investors will put into games
to create new
content- as costs creep over $100 million, I think
we’re
probably pretty close to that limit now. I think these
games are going
to have to shift to how are we going to engage the
community more.
Eventually we’re going to get there, but you’re
right, it’s frustrating that we haven’t gotten
there yet.
Ten
Ton Hammer: The Syndicate
seems to avoid free-to-play games, which is curious
since it seems like
a new game is adopting the free-to-play model every
other week.
Sean
Stalzer: I think it has more
to do with the perception that free-to-play still
means lower
quality. I know that’s certainly not always
true,
but there are certainly a large number of cases out
there where that is
true. I think people still like the idea that you can
pay a
subscription and still get a known set of value rather
than having to
pay for most things that they want. I still don’t
think that
model’s caught on in the MMOG market, which is a bit
ironic,
because that’s the iPhone model.
So, from our perspective, we haven’t found the right
free-to-play MMO that grabs our attention enough that
we’re
willing to take a risk on the cultural aspect of
things.
Ten
Ton Hammer: What about
buy-to-play games? I guess, specifically, I’m
wondering why
Guild
Wars 2
didn’t make your list of highly anticipated games in
the book?
Sean
Stalzer: I know
there’s certainly people that would disagree with
this, but
the
Guild
Wars franchise, to me, is
more akin to a
Call
of Duty
type of model. Very action-oriented, less MMORPG. The
original
Guild Wars
was very exciting and very fun and it certainly
attracted an audience,
but I think it’s almost a subgenre.
I think our community really enjoys the epic,
high-fantasy,
community-focused game, whereas
Guild Wars
has never really pitched itself that way. It’s very
accessible, very fast-paced, almost
Diablo
or
Starcraft
2 like, and a lot of their
community buys into that. We have people in our
community that like
that as well, but I think, for us, it would be a
short-term fad
– I don’t see it piquing our interest long-term.
Ten
Ton Hammer: In closing, was
there anything you wanted to draw out from the book
that we
haven’t talked about yet?
Sean
Stalzer: I think the biggest
selling point of the book is that we do attempt to
help out anyone
interested in starting or running a guild, from the
fledgling guild
master to someone who’s been running guilds for years.
I
think anyone can get something from it, from deciding
what sort of
guild you want to look for, how to create stability,
and even deciding
that they don’t want to go down the path of creating
an
online community. There’s value in that as well; one
of the
biggest challenges to guild stability is that anyone
can split off and
create one.
You can grab an advance copy of The Syndicate: Beyond
the Legend from
LULU.com,
and the book should be available on Amazon.com any day
now. Our thanks
to Sean “Dragons” Stalzer for another peek behind
The Syndicate’s curtain.
